In a recent HigherEdJobs’ Careers & Coffee conversation, we turned to well-being for campus professionals with Dr. Ryan Patel and Dr. Jason Lynch.
Hosted by HigherEdJobs’ Kelly Cherwin, director of editorial strategy, the discussion focused on how faculty and staff can prioritize health and prevent burnout — both personally and at work.
Patel, a psychiatrist with The Ohio State University’s Office of Student Life Counseling and Consultation Service and an adjunct professor of psychiatry at the OSU Wexner Medical Center, and Lynch, an associate professor of higher education at Appalachian State University, shared research-backed strategies and real-world steps. They covered:
- The current mental health landscape on campus
- Everyday practices: sleep, movement and nutrition
- Digital wellness and boundaries
- Peer support and reconnecting to purpose
- What leaders can change now — clear priorities, job crafting and transparent communication
Why Mental Health Matters
Before offering tips, the speakers grounded the conversation in what they see on campuses today: student needs are high, resources are stretched, and that pressure lands on every office.
Patel pointed to national trend data: “American College Health Association … National College Health Assessment NCHA … [shows] increased mental health concern among college students.” Top issues are widespread: “moderate to high stress 86% of students are reporting that,” “about 40% of college students report high levels of anxiety,” “35 to 40% report high levels of depression,” and “48% or one out of two college students score high on … loneliness.” He added, “there are more college students struggling with mental health concerns than there are professionals that can provide that treatment.”
Lynch located those day-to-day strains in a larger system: “This problem isn’t recent, right? This problem has been going on for decades and it’s systemic. It’s a wicked problem.” Part of the squeeze is structural: “We answer to the public. We answer to students, to parents, our colleagues, the government … all these different hands in the same pot.” He also noted longer-term funding shifts: “[It] started in the 80s with the disinvestment in higher education from the states. We have greater access, but we’re not equipped to meet students where they are. It creates this cycle that grinds folks in and out of education.”
What Self-Care Really Is
As the conversation turned from context to solutions, Cherwin asked how the guests define self-care and why it matters in campus roles. Patel set the frame: “Self-care is a practice. Self-care is a skillful attitude that needs practice throughout the day.” He added that, at its core, “it’s three things really. It’s behaviors, it’s how we think about things, and the social supports that we need.”
From there, he named everyday habits that move the needle. “Adequate sleep and good quality sleep helps reduce burnout. It helps reduce feelings of stress, depression, anxiety, substance use.” Nutrition matters as well: “There’s a lot of research that shows that you know appropriate nutrition can help us with feelings of anxiety,” he said, “and it can help us with feelings of depression in a very significant way.” On stress itself: “What is stress? Stress is a internal reaction to external events. I might not be able to change what’s happening outside of me, but I can do something about how my mind and my body reacts to that stress.”
Lynch offered a plain definition from lived experience: “Self-care is really kind of listening to your body’s wisdom.” After starting treatment for severe sleep apnea, he said, “So, I started using this CPAP,” and “my scores have been at zero since probably about week six.” He also explained the equity and power dynamics on campus: “Self-care is a privilege in higher education. I don’t think that everybody gets to practice self-care in the same ways.” He contrasted roles: “I’m a tenured professor now. I can practice self-care in lots of ways. I can push back. I can set boundaries.” Earlier in his career it was different: “Whenever I was a staff member of first year residence hall director, there was no way that I was going to do any of that because I thought that I was going to get fired.” His bottom line: “We need to have a really serious discussion around the system and culture that would allow those practices to happen to begin with.”
Simple Steps You Can Start Today
- Protect your sleep. If nights are rough, talk to your provider. Lynch shared that after starting a CPAP for severe sleep apnea, his depression scores dropped to zero within weeks.
- Move your body. Any activity you will repeat works.
- Eat to fuel your brain. Patel highlighted how better nutrition can improve mood in a “very significant way.”
- Lean on peers. Find “somebody who gets what I do and gets the challenges that I face,” Patel said.
- Reconnect to purpose. Ask why the work matters to you.
Tame Your Phone Use and the News Consumption
“There’s a number of research studies that are showing that the once you get past that first hour, every additional hour of discretionary media use … has a negative effect on our mental health,” Patel said.
He added that “light exposure at bedtime delays our ability to get quality sleep.”
Lynch warned about doomscrolling: waking up and thinking “what awaits me right now in the news? “Can push you into fight-or-flight.
Higher education professionals can support healthy limits on media and news consumption by diversifying how they share information. If students can only find campus news and event details on Instagram, that becomes a barrier to setting boundaries. As one student told Lynch, “I really wish the university would use more flyers because I feel compelled to have to be on Instagram because that’s the only way that we get information about things.”
Practical norms help, too. Patel said, “If you’re thinking about like midnight deadlines, is that going to help our students go to bed on time? Probably not.” He also noted that tools like schedule send and a brief signature line stating that no after-hours response is expected can reduce the “always on” pressure.
Where To Find Support
Lynch highlighted Employee Assistance Programs: a supervisor “helped connect me with the employee assistance program and they helped find one of the best therapists I ever had.”
Patel suggested job crafting with supervisors and more transparency around decisions because “it’s often the worries about what might happen that can really have a negative effect on our mental health.”
When You Have Too much To Do
Co-prioritize with your boss. Lynch’s go to script? “Help me figure out what the priorities are.”
Set clear capacity. Patel offered this language: “I can take that on, but what would you like me to take off so that I can do this?”
Also, not everything is urgent. “I would venture that 75% of jobs on campus are not life and death,” Lynch said.
What Leaders Should Change
“You’re not going to have a 30-minute program that is all of a sudden going to change everybody’s mind,” Lynch said. Map the employee journey, find hot spots policy creates, and fix them.
Leaders should protect time for connection, set clear rules for urgency, and model healthy boundaries.
We hope this Careers & Coffee session — recorded and available on YouTube here — helps faculty and staff protect their well-being, prevent burnout, and re-engage with purpose this semester.
Follow HigherEdJobs on Linkedin to get updates on future Careers & Coffee events, resources, and replays.
